Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice is a shockingly cynical mobile spin-off

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SHOULD I PLAY FROSTPUNK: BEYOND THE ICE?

No. Where the original Frostpunk was an exercise in tough decision-making, Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice only is interested in your credit card. The pressures of scarcity and harsh conditions have been converted into encouragement to spend money on Beyond the Ice’s battle pass and one-time booster packs. This is a soulless shell of the original game that’s wrapped around a mobile busybox that is nakedly aggressive about pushing microtransactions—possibly the most cynical use of a beloved IP since SimCity BuildIt.

TIME PLAYED

I played about three hours of Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice. The whole time was spent gradually expanding my circular village around the warmth-giving generator. I managed to eventually build two coal mines, two greenhouses, a production facility and a fine goods factory, a cookhouse, and a bunch of dwellings that ranged from simple tents to upgraded bunkhouses. I upgraded my generator to level two, and had a tax office and trading post up and running.

WHAT’S AWESOME ABOUT FROSTPUNK: BEYOND THE ICE?

• It looks great. One nice thing I can say about Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice is that its visuals are spot-on. The deep snow and the warm, orange glow of the central reactor looked great on my phone’s screen, and I had free rein to move the camera around and get whatever view of my town that I wanted. Workers trudged through the deep snow, slowly making pathways to new resource nodes I had discovered, and the menu artwork is all beautiful and thematic.

WHAT NEEDS IMPROVEMENT IN FROSTPUNK: BEYOND THE ICE?

• Sloppy translation. The English voiceover and text in Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice needs work. A newly arrived survivor told me that “we need more road(s),” which is not how someone would actually speak. My second-in-command talked about how we needed “a lot of coals” to keep the reactor running. I don’t think it’s solely a translation issue, though—many of the lines just haven’t made a lot of sense, and most of the dialogue seems to serve as meaningless placeholder to fill time.

• The interesting policy decisions are gone. There’s no opportunity in Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice to shape the governing philosophy of your frigid little town the way you could in Frostpunk, at least that I saw while I played. Everything was solely focused on grinding commodities and currency, so there wasn’t much room for decisions about authoritarianism versus egalitarianism. How people lived their lives in my village was not a consideration; the only thing that mattered was how big the population was and how quickly it could produce coal, wood, and the various finished goods I needed to trade for construction projects. In this way, Frostpunk: Beyond the Ice accidentally became a tidy little capitalism simulation.

• It’s a morally bankrupt perversion of the original game’s ideas. In the original Frostpunk, I had to constantly balance my need for scarce resources against the population’s need for warmth, shelter, and sustenance. The only way to have enough food and fuel was to overwork my citizens, which in turn led to other problems. The discomfort I felt about deciding what I was willing to sacrifice was the entire point of the game.

So it’s not just that developer Com2uS has turned Frostpunk into just another empty-headed mobile city-builder about watching timers run down—although make no mistake, Beyond the Ice is that too. But the biggest shame is that it takes the crucial pressures and feelings of guilt that made the first game so compelling and instead uses them to squeeze players for their money. Oh, are your people starving to death and freezing? Maybe you could buy a booster pack to rush construction of some new buildings—or are you just going to let them die? Every single interesting game mechanic from Frostpunk has been turned into a hamster wheel that eventually charges you to run in it.

PLATFORM TESTED

Android on Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra 5G phone.